“Sir,” I said.
From behind Annamaria and the boy, a booming arose as blows were struck at the copper-clad door. The freaks must have gotten into the tower. They were trying to chop down the door of our final redoubt.
“Mental midgets,” Tesla repeated, “nothing but superstitious fools.
“Sir, the pigs are coming.”
He tried to open the lid of the console between our seats. His hand passed
I opened the console box and found what looked like one of those sports-car gearshifts that offers a full-hand grip instead of a knob. It was labeled MASTER SWITCH.
“Pull it!” Tesla urged. “Put an end to this and me.”
Before I pulled it, I said, “I would have liked to know you, Mr. Tesla.”
“Likewise. From what I’ve seen of you here and there, you’re a righteous lad with the pluck and the brains to do great things.”
“Not really, sir. I just make it up as I go along.”
He shrugged. “Who doesn’t?”
When I pulled back hard on the master switch, Tesla vanished. Beyond the capsule, the inner gimbal mounting, previously in silent and unceasing motion, came to a halt with a great grinding noise.
The freaks broke down the door.
Fifty-two
I scrambled out of the egg and joined Annamaria and Tim under the great golden rib cage of the dead machine.
The boy had snatched up my Beretta from the floor where Cloyce had discarded it after taking it from me. Following my encounter with Victoria in the tunnel, I had replenished the magazine.
Four freaks were in the room, however, and seventeen rounds might not be sufficient. I didn’t think they would be sporting enough to allow me time to reload.
I had expected the full tide to end instantly upon throwing the master switch. I didn’t know why the freaks failed to vanish like Tesla, and at that moment it didn’t seem to matter worth a damn that I had an excellent pancake recipe.
Annamaria and Tim and I stood with our backs to one another, so that we could watch the four beasts as they warily circled the chronosphere, beyond the first gimbal mounting. They grumbled and snarled and didn’t seem to trust the machine. They snorted, grimaced, and shook their heads as though they smelled something disagreeable, and they blew gouts of mucus from their fleshy snouts into their hands and wiped their hands on their flanks, as if they wanted to disgust us as much as they wanted to terrify us.
Beads of sweat stippled my brow.
“If they rush us all at once,” I said, “you two drop low, so I can turn in a circle and fire over your heads.”
“They won’t rush us,” Annamaria assured me. “This unpleasantness is almost over.”
“They might rush us,” I disagreed.
“You worry too much, odd one.”
“Ma’am, I don’t mean this to sound harsh, but you don’t worry enough.”
“What does worry accomplish except to breed more worry?”
We might have gotten into our first argument then, although a genteel one, but the largest of the four freaks changed the subject when it spoke in a low rough voice that caused spiders of dread to skitter up my spine: “Woman with baby.”
Until this moment, there had been no indication that these monsters had the capacity for language, let alone that they could speak English.
“Give me baby,” the thing said.
The speaker had a larger head than the others, with a brow less sloped. Maybe it was the only one of them that could talk.
“Give me baby,” it repeated.
I was sweating worse by the moment. I was sweating like, well, a pig.
“You may not make demands of me,” Annamaria told the talking freak. “You have no power here.”
“We kill,” it said. “We eat baby.”
“Be gone from here,” she said. “Know your place and be there.”
The four of them began to move slowly toward us, as shadowless as we were, pale skin and tufts of gray wiry hair, but nevertheless four figures of darkness, as if their shadows had slithered within them to nest and then had multiplied into legions to fill them with blackest hate. Three had axes, and one carried a hammer.
Taking a two-hand grip on the Beretta, I aimed at one of the three who hadn’t yet spoken.
The chatty one said, “I was born to eat baby, your baby,
“This is not your time,” she said calmly, “nor will there be any time for you to kill me or to touch this baby. Go now. Go to your misery.”
Maybe it was just me, just the state of my mind at that moment, which wasn’t good, but it seemed that something more was going on here than I quite understood. I often had that feeling when in the company of my mysterious companion, but never more so than at that moment.
“Go to your misery,” she repeated.
They rushed us — as I
“It’s getting really hot in here,” Tim said.
I had attributed the heat to the pressure of the confrontation, but it proved not to be a subjective reaction to stress. The room was rapidly growing hotter.
Remembering what Timothy had told me earlier, that the time-management machinery was secondarily the power plant for Roseland, harnessing the thermodynamic consequences of its primary purpose, I suddenly wondered if Tesla might have been wise enough to provide a master switch that not only turned off the machine but also destroyed it with its own stored heat.
“We better get out of here,” I said. “This place is gonna blow.”
“Worry only breeds more worry,” Annamaria reminded me.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, and I hustled them around the chronosphere, keeping them away from Cloyce’s body, snatched up the plastic-wrapped bundle of money, and followed them across the broken-down door into the stairwell.
Freaks on the landings faded away as we approached them, and freaks in the yard brandished weapons at us and howled and might have assaulted us if they, too, hadn’t shimmered away on the receding tide of displaced time.
Raphael and Boo suddenly sprinted past us, ears flat to their heads and tails tucked.
As we hurried along the path through the eucalyptus grove, I heard something collapsing high in the tower, a colossal noise that rang like a carillon of tuneless bells. When I glanced back, every pane shattered and golden dust blew out of every window. The walls shook, and stones began to rain down through the trees.
When we escaped the eucalyptuses and reached the long slope of lawn that led up to the main house, we found the dogs frozen with their hackles raised. They were focused on the long green fairway that was the Enceladus lawn leading off to the south, away from the house, but it was not the distant statue of the Titan that caused Raphael and Boo to bare their teeth.
Something moved in the cloaking shadows beneath the live oaks that bordered the west side of that lawn. At first it was only an immense paleness, a heaving shapeless mass that surged insistently through the grove,
